Mineral County votes against non-partisan election measure
<p>Cindy Grimm and Mary Yarnall check in sealed lock boxes containing ballots at the Mineral County Courthouse during election night.</p>
MINERAL COUNTY - Elected officials in Mineral County will still have political party affiliations attached to their names on future ballots.
County residents had the opportunity to change to non-partisan elections as they headed to polling places last Tuesday, but the measure failed by a slim margin (46.98 percent for and 53.02 percent against.)
A little over 100 votes were all that was needed to strike the measure down.
Proponents of the measure began discussing non-partisan elections after the last statewide election and met as a group as early as February to begin campaigning to have a measure on the November ballot.
"So many people were mad about what happened in the last statewide election," Judy Stang, former county commissioner and current real estate agent said in a previous article. "A lot of people were voted in based on party affiliation and what happened in a lot of counties is they had a lot of people that weren’t educated on how to do the job."
The group attempted to follow in the footsteps of other counties such as Sanders and Lincoln, who successfully changed to non-partisan elections.
However the numbers at the polls showed that the county is not ready for such elections and while the measure failed by a narrow margin only one voting district, the West End, saw the majority of voters in favor of the change.